TestDisk saved our lives

Last week while I was trying to teach my colleague how to transfer data back from another hard disk, something terrible happened. All of a sudden the hard disk accidentally slipped out of his hands and fell onto the hard cold cement floor. FYI, the hard disk is the most fragile part of the computers system. Hard disks we can buy, but the data inside; they’re simply irreplaceable. And it’s not just anybody’s hard disk. It’s the deputy director of the UiTM 2 project. We could have caused a minor crisis should he loose all his 2 years worth of data.

The back up hard disk that contained the entire deputy director’s data had somehow turned into a dynamic drive and became inaccessible. I know it’s not my fault but I just couldn’t let my colleague take all the blame, it just doesn’t seem right. So I tried attaching the hard disk on another computer, turning it into a slave, change the jumpers, even attempt to retrieve it with a Linux live CD but all to no avail. Time was running out and my colleague was already thinking of sending it to a professional data retrieval firm (which gonna cost him a couple hundred ringgit).

After trying for nearly an hour, I almost give up hope too until I stumbled into this nifty little software on Google. TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software, primarily designed to recover lost partitions caused by faulty software, certain type of viruses or just plain human error. TestDisk can run under DOS, Windows, Linux and Mac OS and also help recover lost partitions in those file systems.

In the end I managed to recover all of the deputy director’s data, my colleague treated me for lunch at Secret Recipe, potential disaster averted and everybody’s happy! My hard disk that fell to the floor crashed a few days later but that’s okay, at least we get to keep our jobs the UiTM 2 project goes on on schedule. Sigh.